The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can ...write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My criticisms are always simple; they are limited to one word:MOmit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and eve...ry page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak words and useless pages I have written; but the law is sound, and every book written without a superfluous page or word is a masterpiece. All the same, no one cares to apply so stern a law to another person. One has right to be severe only with oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a... sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In matter of commerce the fault of the DutchIs offering too little and asking too much....The French are with equal advantage content,So we clap on Dutch bottoms just twenty per cent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is ...composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, let's say, or Doc Williams's Patterson.... The game is definitely an epic ... formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

London, thou art of townes A per se.Soveraign of cities, semeliest in sight,...Of high renoun, riches, and royaltie;Of lordis, barons, and many goodly knyght;Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;Of famous prelatis in habitis clericall;Of merchauntis full of substaunce and myght:London, thou art the flour of Cities allLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning... her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »